Referring to his own work on the fossil fishes in the early forties, Professor Agassiz once said to the writer: "At that time I was on the verge of anticipating the views of Darwin, but it seemed to me that the facts were contrary to the theories of evolution. We had the highest fishes first." This statement leads us to consider what is meant by high and low. Undoubtedly the sharks are higher than the bony fishes in the sense of being nearer to the higher vertebrates. In brain, muscle, teeth, and reproductive structures they are also more highly developed. In all skeletal and cranial characters the sharks stand distinctly lower. But the essential fact, so far as evolution is concerned, is not that the sharks are high or low. They are, in almost all respects, distinctly generalized and primitive. The bony fishes are specialized in various ways through adaptation to the various modes of life they lead. Much of this specialization involves corresponding degeneration of organs whose functions have ceased to be important. As a broad proposition it is not true that "we had our highest fishes first," for in a complete definition of high and low, the specialized perch or bass stands higher. But whether true or not, it does not touch the question of evolution which is throughout a process of adaptation to conditions of life. Referring to the position of Agassiz and his early friend and disciple, Hugh Miller, Dr. Traquair (1900) uses these words in an address at Bradford, England: "It cannot but be acknowledged that the paleontology of fishes is not less emphatic in the support of descent than that of any other division of the animal kingdom. But in former days the evidence of fossil ichthyology was by some read otherwise. "It is now a little over forty years since Hugh Miller died: he who was one of the first collectors of the fossil fishes of the Scottish old red sandstone, and who knew these in some respects better than any other man of his time, not excepting Agassiz himself. Yet his life was spent in a fierce denunciation of the doctrine of evolution, then only in its Lamarckian form, as Darwin had not yet electrified the world with his 'Origin of Species.' Many a time I wonder greatly what Hugh Miller would have thought had he lived a few years longer, so as to have been able to see the remarkable revolution which was wrought by the publication of that book.